How Much Does Nonverbal Communication Conform to Entropy Rate Constancy?: A Case Study on Listener Gaze in Interaction

Yu Wang, Yang Xu, Gabriel Skantze, Hendrik Buschmeier


Abstract
According to the Entropy Rate Constancy (ERC) principle, the information density of a text is approximately constant over its length. Whether this principle also applies to nonverbal communication signals is still under investigation. We perform empirical analyses of video-recorded dialogue data and investigate whether listener gaze, as an important nonverbal communication signal, adheres to the ERC principle. Results show (1) that the ERC principle holds for listener gaze; and (2) that the two linguistic factors syntactic complexity and turn transition potential are weakly correlated with local entropy of listener gaze.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.210
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
3533–3545
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.210
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Yu Wang, Yang Xu, Gabriel Skantze, and Hendrik Buschmeier. 2024. How Much Does Nonverbal Communication Conform to Entropy Rate Constancy?: A Case Study on Listener Gaze in Interaction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 3533–3545, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Much Does Nonverbal Communication Conform to Entropy Rate Constancy?: A Case Study on Listener Gaze in Interaction (Wang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.210.pdf